composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the government to take to pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man-of-war, Constitution.  Holmes’s indignant protest—­which has been a favorite subject for school-boy declamation—­had the effect of postponing the vessel’s fate for a great many years.  From 1830-35 the young poet was pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing now and then some verses to the magazines.  Of his life as a medical student in Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his Autocrat and other writings, as where he tells, for instance, of a dinner-party of Americans in the French capital, where one of the company brought tears of homesickness into the eyes of his sodales by saying that the tinkle of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the cow-bells in the rocky old pastures of New England.  In 1836 he printed his first collection of poems.  The volume contained, among a number of pieces broadly comic, like the September Gale, the Music Grinders, and the Ballad of the Oyster-man—­which at once became widely popular—­a few poems of a finer and quieter temper, in which there was a quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic.  Such were My Aunt and the Last Leaf—­which Abraham Lincoln found “inexpressibly touching,” and which it is difficult to read without the double tribute of a smile and a tear.  The volume contained also Poetry:  A Metrical Essay, read before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which was the first of that long line of capital occasional poems which Holmes has been spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue and with scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems read or spoken or sung at all manner of gatherings, public and private, at Harvard commencements, class days, and other academic anniversaries; at inaugurations, centennials, dedications of cemeteries, meetings of medical associations, mercantile libraries, Burns clubs, and New England societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; openings of theaters, layings of corner-stones, birthday celebrations, jubilees, funerals, commemoration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese embassy, and what not.  Probably no poet of any age or clime has written so much and so well to order.  He has been particularly happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big civic feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the petit comite—­the snug little dinners of the chosen few; his

  “The quaint trick to cram the pithy line
  That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine.”

And although he could write on occasion a Song for a Temperance Dinner, he has preferred to chant the praise of the punch bowl and to

    “feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o’er me stealing,
  The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling.”